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Month: July 2013

In our personal lives, we know shit happens. Unexpected events occur from time to time. Great, painful, weird, horrifying. Life has a way of sucker punching that smug grin right off our collective face.

But many founders aren’t prepared for how often this happens at startups. “We have ample funding, a great team, and a killer product strategy – what could possibly go wrong?”

Everything. No seriously. Everything. Except for those of you that are really smart, have an ivy league MBA and an awesome business plan with a detailed section on risk.

Just kidding, you’re screwed too.

Here’s the thing about risks: they’re inherently unknown, possible future hazards we may or may not encounter. Stop fixating on your business plan. Odds are Chaos Theory will describe the path of your business much better than any plan. And as Brad Feld wrote, business plans are an historical artifact. It’s about to get real.

Examples? Anything you can think of. Critical bugs in version 1.0, then again in 1.01, and 1.1. Your market changes. Your lead developer flees the country. You get sued. Manufacturing costs triple. You get hacked. You get sued again. And that could be just the first six months.

Fortunately founders are becoming increasingly transparent about these realities. Ben Milne of Dwolla wrote a really nice lessons learned post. Nait Jones of Aglocal described what he learned during his rookie year as CEO. These are smart, driven entrepreneurs with talented teams and top tier funding. Yet their humbling experiences are the rule, not the exception.

Diana Kander from the Kauffman Foundation gave a funny and smart speech at Big Omaha about the similarities between having a baby and launching a startup (she was six months pregnant at the time). While her main point was to caution against rushing from idea phase right into execution, the subtext included a great parallel between babies and startups: you’ll never be fully prepared for them because you have no idea what’s gonna happen. As a parent and past founder, I say hell yeah.

Whenever someone asks about the projects I’ve led, I fixate on the Overland Park facility project. I’ve also led teams that built data centers, campus-wide IT infrastructure, and telephony and digital video products. But I always talk about Overland Park. Why?

Scale, baby.

Nine figure budget. 300,000 square feet. 1,600 new employees. The third largest mail order pharmacy in the world. 100,000 prescriptions a day.

The mail order pharmacy was only 60,000 square feet of the facility but it was the fun part. Downstairs the other 240,000 was allocated for offices and cubicles. But upstairs we were building a customized system so large only one vendor in the industry had done it. And they were exclusive to our largest competitor.

It was an adrenaline-fueled experience, and the 11 months leading up to Go Live were especially crazy. It was the most stressful and rewarding period of my career. We couldn’t miss that September 12 Go Live, and we didn’t thanks to an awesome team, many vendor battles, and 80 hour weeks.

Several politicians including the governor (now Cabinet member) attended the ribbon cutting. When the system ramp-up was finally finished it was truly a showcase facility. Super clean, highly automated and brightly lit, visitors from other facilities said our warehouse was cleaner than their pharmacy.

Today when I look out over the pharmacy I’m still filled with a childlike pride, like after building a huge LEGO village. If a LEGO village could generate billions in annual revenue. (A slide show of the project is here. Press coverage is here.)

We turned our design ideas into this enormous, complex, useful thing that impacts millions of lives. One of the many lessons I learned is it takes about the same effort to build something huge vs. something moderate. It’s a good reminder to think and build big. Big products, big markets, big disruption.